JAX-SPH: A Differentiable Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Framework

Particle-based fluid simulations have emerged as a powerful tool for solving the Navier-Stokes equations, especially in cases that include intricate physics and free surfaces. The recent addition of machine learning methods to the toolbox for solving such problems is pushing the boundary of the quality vs. speed tradeoff of such numerical simulations. In this work, we lead the way to Lagrangian fluid simulators compatible with deep learning frameworks, and propose JAX-SPH - a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) framework implemented in JAX. JAX-SPH builds on the code for dataset generation from the LagrangeBench project (Toshev et al., 2023) and extends this code in multiple ways: (a) integration of further key SPH algorithms, (b) restructuring the code toward a Python library, (c) verification of the gradients through the solver, and (d) demonstration of the utility of the gradients for solving inverse problems as well as a Solver-in-the-Loop application. Our code is available at https://github.com/tumaer/jax-sph.

Neural SPH: Improved Neural Modeling of Lagrangian Fluid Dynamics

Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is omnipresent in modern engineering and scientific disciplines. SPH is a class of Lagrangian schemes that discretize fluid dynamics via finite material points that are tracked through the evolving velocity field. Due to the particle-like nature of the simulation, graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as appealing and successful surrogates. However, the practical utility of such GNN-based simulators relies on their ability to faithfully model physics, providing accurate and stable predictions over long time horizons - which is a notoriously hard problem. In this work, we identify particle clustering originating from tensile instabilities as one of the primary pitfalls. Based on these insights, we enhance both training and rollout inference of state-of-the-art GNN-based simulators with varying components from standard SPH solvers, including pressure, viscous, and external force components. All neural SPH-enhanced simulators achieve better performance, often by orders of magnitude, than the baseline GNNs, allowing for significantly longer rollouts and significantly better physics modeling. Code available under (https://github.com/tumaer/neuralsph).